ANGELIKA KAUFFMANN 1741 - 1807

Angelika Kauffmann’s great talent, her social grace and her much-lauded “tender soul,” the epitome of female sensitivity at that time, made her one of the most successful female artists of history. She was considered to be the most cultivated woman in Europe, and in her day, the whole world seemed to be “Angelika-mad”—crazy about her work.

Her salon in Rome, in a palazzo that previously belonged to the painter Anton Raphael Mengs, was the cosmopolitan hub of artists, aristocrats and intellectuals. She was a member of the art academies of Bologna, Florence, Rome and Venice. In 1768 she was one of the 22 founding members of the Royal Academy led by Joshua Reynolds, and she remained the only female member for the next 200 years, beside the still life painter Mary Moser (1744-1819).

Born on October 30, 1741 in Chur, Switzerland, Angelika Kauffmann was hailed as a child prodigy at an early age, and as an only child she received an unusually comprehensive education from her parents. Her father, Johann Joseph Kauffmann, a portrait and fresco painter from the Bregenz Forest, gave her painting and music lessons. Her mother Cleophea Lutz taught her German and Italian, then English and French. As a teenager she travelled through Italy with her father, and made herself a name as a portraitist. After her mother’s death in 1757, she returned to Schwarzenberg with her father.

From January 1763 she resided with her father in Rome, where she remained until 1766. She painted portraits of many of her contemporaries there. Her 1764 portrait of the founder of modern art history and classical archaeology, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, made her famous overnight. In 1766 Angelika Kauffmann moved to London, and during her 15-year stay she created groundbreaking history paintings.

Kauffmann did not interpret the genre of history painting as one of battleground depictions and staged heroism; instead her paintings are charged with the spirit of the “Sturm und Drang” movement. She depicted the heroes and gods of ancient Greece, from Paris to Pallas Athene, with a new, human dimension—theatrical and dramatic, but with poses possessing a grace and elegance that lent a distinctive, ethereal expression to her pictures. The subtext of these paintings is unmistakeably an era of heightened sensitivity, which celebrated feelings like mourning, loyalty, injury and loss.

In 1782, Angelika Kauffmann moved into a house and studio near Santa Trinità dei Monti atop the Pincian Hill in Rome, with her husband Antonio Zucchi. The former house of the painter Anton Raphael Mengs on Via Sistina 72 became a meeting place for the artists of the city, but also for the high aristocracy. Emperor Joseph II was a guest there, the Bavarian Crown Prince, Anna Amalia of Saxony-Weimar-Eisenach, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Johann Gottfried Herder likewise. This Goethe quote dates back to the period: “She has a most remarkable, and for a woman unheard-of, talent.”

In 1792 Kauffmann painted what is likely her most important self-portrait, Self-Portrait Hesitating Between Painting and Music, which is on view at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow today. Antonio Zucchi died in 1795, and she consequently withdrew from public life. In her painting she increasingly pursued religious topics. She never fully recovered from a serious illness in 1802. Angelika Kauffmann died on November 5, 1807 at the age of 66, and was buried in the church Sant’ Andrea delle Fratte.